figure.
He struggled to his feet and limped back into the studio. A fire smouldered in the grate and the room was still warm. From this he concluded that his unconsciousness could not have lasted more than an hour. He went to the side cabinet and extracted the brandy bottle. He took three quick slugs before replacing it.
He crossed the room to the corner where the shipping crate lay discarded, left behind in his excitement over Patrick’s camera. He turned it upside down. A brown envelope slipped free and drifted to the floor. No name was indicated, but he knew it was meant for him.
Inside was a photograph. Lowell recognised it as one that he himself had taken many years before. In the picture, a young child regarded the camera without smiling. Patrick. The child’s features were fair, his nose turned slightly to the right where it had once been broken. His eyes were blue: wide with terror, blank with suffering.
Lowell blinked. His vision blurred. The room swam before him and the blood rushed to his ears. He thrust the photograph into the fire. He watched it light — the child’s face blackening, falling through — and then lunged for Patrick’s camera.
He toppled the tripod, dashing the instrument onto the floor. Dropping to his knees, he ripped free the hood and shattered the slide loader, punching through the mahogany frame, his knuckles splitting where they connected with brass. He plucked out the lens from the viewfinder and carried it into the darkroom, the glass slipping between his injured fingers. In the darkroom, he held up the lens to the mirror and glimpsed himself in its depths.
What did he hope to see there? Lowell could not say. Some hidden truth, perhaps — some veiled hope of which he was only half-aware. But his appearance had not altered. In the lens, he saw only the same broken man as in the mirror, a bloodied beast stalked by the same demons, the same ghosts. With a roar of agony, more animal than human, he hurled the lens against the far wall and heard it shatter.
He returned to the studio and shot the deadbolt, the better to escape down the neck of a brandy bottle. And so the night passed. He drank — he did not pray — and the darkness drew near as with the rustle of fabric, a starless hood that stretched to cover the city, to gather all creation in its sweep. At dawn, the wind turned southerly. The snow became a bitter rain that drummed like pebbles on the walls of the studio.
He was awakened by the doorbell. It was midday, the sun’s glare doubled by slush and snowmelt. He went to the door and cracked it open, withdrawing the chain when he recognised the clerk from the post office.
“Yes?” he croaked. “What do you want?”
The clerk started, shocked by the change in Lowell’s appearance.
“You didn’t stop by, sir. Yesterday, sir. Before we locked up.”
“No,” he said. “I was — delayed.”
“I have this for you,” said the clerk. “I’m sorry, sir.”
The tersely-worded missive contained the news of Patrick’s death.
On 29 November, the young man had sold off his apartment and settled his debts before returning to the studio. After he failed to emerge, his friends had summoned the officers, who found him in the darkroom, a suicide.
It was later reported that Patrick had boxed up all of his possessions prior to his death: his books, his papers, his prints. Only his camera was found to be missing.
Lowell’s story ended there. For a time neither of us spoke. Crickets sang in the nearby underbrush. The moon emerged from a bank of clouds, recasting the landscape from shades of silver. Lowell stubbed out his cigar and disappeared inside.
Five years have passed since our brief meeting, and yet I find his story has not left me. Lowell spoke eloquently of light and darkness — and of the dark that cannot be illumined — and within his tale itself there is another kind of darkness, a history hidden from the light of narrative: shadowed, secret, and thus ineradicable.
I woke the next morning to find that he had gone. He had departed the resort at first light and returned to Providence. I do not know what has become of him. Sometimes I like to think that he has found some measure of peace, whatever the nature of his past sins. In any event, I doubt that I shall see him again.
MARK SAMUELS
The Tower
MARK SAMUELS LIVES ALONE in a garret in London, England. He is the author of four acclaimed short story collections:
“The Tower” is the seventh of his tales to appear in
About the following story, Samuels reveals: “Actually, this is more of an autobiographical piece than a work of fiction. In psychological and spiritual terms, every word of it is the truth.”
MY CUSTOM, for many weeks, just after awaking at dawn, was to walk the streets in the region around King’s Cross. They are a bewildering mixture of decay and modern renovation. A number of the buildings seem in danger of being pulled down, because they do not appear to fit the image of the brand new and commercially successful ideal the redevelopers have in mind.
I think of the “Lighthouse” (which has no light) atop a dilapidated building on the corner of the Gray’s Inn Road, just opposite the station.
I think of the old Eastern Goods Yard just north of the station, its sidings abandoned, the vast wooden structure now scarcely covered by the paint that has turned grey and peeled off, its bulk surrounded by a field of weeds that have broken through the pavement. It, along with Granary Square, will soon be remade, and turned into something as grotesque in appearance as an elderly woman who has become the casualty of too much plastic surgery.
I think also of the wharves, where cargoes were offloaded from narrowboats on Regent’s Canal, the buildings now lost to chic design companies who produce nothing of lasting value.
It is still possible to wander in this area and discover corpse structures: closed-down and boarded-up pubs left abandoned, the silent remains of a record shop that sold vinyl, an empty sex shop with dust-obscured windows, fast food restaurants where now only hordes of vermin feed. I remember passing by all of these places when they were still active. Now they are gutted, with only decaying outward shells as reminders of their having been there at all. In a few more years even these remnants will have vanished completely — “regenerated” into yet another useless tentacle of corporate nonsense.
As I wandered in the early morning sunlight, golden and dazzling, it seemed to me that the remains of the past were more beautiful than what was to come. The future offered no prospect but a soulless death, all the more terrifying for its not being acknowledged. The solidity of the past, the idea of permanence, was over, and it had been replaced by a new ethos of disposability and change for its own sake, under the guise of so called “progress”. But progress towards what destination?
For no destination seemed to be in mind, only “progress” for its own sake, only an end that could not be reached, only the doing away with all that shows any sign of having reached old age. The human race now lives solely in order to try and prolong its own youth indefinitely. And that was progress?
Those ruined and decayed remains of buildings that have been abandoned due to their commercial worthlessness have more mystery about them than any number of new glass and steel developments. They are testaments to the truth that the city is not solely the business centre its rulers would have us take pride in, but that it is an organic entity with an occult life and history of its own. For there are still ghosts in those shells, and, just as long as memory lingers and imagination is not stamped out by the profit motive, the ghosts will live on.
